Prep, practice and rallypoint

Token statement about time, commitments, psychological anguish (my own).

But I've been itching to write about a local teams event I attended recently; teams were 3 people, one list per person, with a simple match up process of roll-off get's to decide whether to choose the first, or last two match-ups. Me and the two guys I played with won the event, but before I discuss that I'm keen to first write about the preparation process leading up to Rallypoint (if you can call an extended facebook chat and 2 games prep?).

With me, Luke, and Greg, Team Ninja formed once again, a name forged through a process I wasn't a part of so I don't know how to explain it, but what ever; ninjas are well known for their team work or something.

Preparing for Rallypoint became an exercise between the three of us, deciding what was the strongest combination of casters we could bring from our available collections, and balance out our weaknesses in preparation for what we expected to face. I went with my Cryx and pSkarre because fair and balanced. Luke has had much practice running Runes of War, so we determined that as our 'armour brick'. Greg had recently acquired a bunch of Cygnar, so he was lumped with the burden of pHaley as our Cryx drop. With casters in mind, we built rough lists (so much variety to consider for RoW) to begin practice with and see if we actually were able to counter each others' weaknesses. I had a rough go at making a grid for ourselves in terms of covering opposing factions;

Yerp, crude as flip. This was all largely theory as well; my own experience with Skarre was playing her in a couple of tournaments when I was green as all heck a couple of years ago, and Greg had only just started with Cygnar. I can safely say we were banking  hard on the obvious strengths of those warcasters to carry us through our games if we got the match-up process right. Looking at the chart above, we assumed that we would have a hard time into Ret, particularly in relation to Rayvn's tier, but again; this was all theory and conjecture.  It made a bit of sense to try and practice our lists. Right? Right.

First, me and Greg played into one another essentially to test the theory that pHaley > Cryx, photographing the game on a turn by turn basis and let Luke know how we did and expose ourselves to sideline ridicule. After my second turn I had the pace to push up through Temporal Barrier. I had most of my force occupying the mid-zone, and was feeling good that I'd have sufficient resources to attrition Greg out of the game.

Then Cygnar things happened:

Fuck.

Ok, hypothesis holds strong. pHaley can remove single wound infantry pretty trivially. This was also a lesson for myself of when to time Skarre's feat; I've been stung before feating defensively, but against a list like this, it definitely would have been the right call.

Unfortunately for Greg, there was also a lesson to be learnt about standing to close to the Helldiver's burrow token:

In the end I had the feat and Dark Guidance up, and BARELY enough resources to clear the jamming Forgeguard to allow the Helldiver to walk into Haley. Greg tried to block the real estate around Haley, but those burrow rules are hard to plan around. Apart from those complications, it otherwise felt like Greg's list fit into a nice slot in our team, and I got to experience the joy of pushing a single wound infantry melee hoard into what felt like a 2 hour dick punch.

In a couple of days, I had a follow up match against Luke's Trolls, to test the theory behind my list: Skarre plus dudes > Armour. And that's essentially how the game went, being able to trade small models for larger pieces, and Luke not having sufficient infantry removal to clear everyone out. Things did get hairy though, when the Earthborn trampled and goaded over to where I thought Skarre was safe behind her wall

He whiffed his attacks, but it was certainly a lesson on needing to keep her safe. Otherwise I felt my list was humming; it was skewed the way I wanted it to sit, and was able to be trotted out against the armour heavy lists I anticipated to see at Rallypoint the following weekend.